


volleyhell: the drabble series

by ilgaksu



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Drabble Series, Gen, M/M, Multi, Other, Twitter made me do it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-26 17:45:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5014081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>twitter is a filthy enabler. i have real work to be doing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. kill your heroes (noya/asahi, canon compliant)

**Author's Note:**

> for pandamani, based on their picture of noya in asahi's sweater

So, here's the thing: Yuu makes warpaint of his body, drapes it with armour in the form of blaring slogans and slicks gel-bleach-sweat through his hair to make himself a crown. But he gives himself away. The calligraphy is too neat, turning him at second glance from hard-nosed punk to an earnest boy with steady hands. He gives himself away, does Nishinoya Yuu; when the broom cracks it's to cover the sound between his ribs. When he shouts at Asahi, it's to cover the sirens of his eyes going _why did you leave me how could you leave me how could you find the strength._

When he smiles, lopsided and wry, the smell of Asahi's shampoo picking up clear in his hair, he becomes something known and alien all at once. When he curls his shoulders in under the folds of Asahi's sweater, he becomes something that can be (and has been, and will be) hurt. Asahi stares at the drape of the material, the weight of it, and focuses on the unravelling threads at the hem rather than look at Noya's legs, his hands, the interplay of bone and muscle taut underneath the softness of fabric. He curls his hands in the coverlet, stricken. The paralysis itself is familiar to him; it's been his shadow, his twin, his solace and his archenemy ever since he was born. The want is not. The want lances through him like he's been cut wide open, and so he looks at the hem and at his own hands, and not at anything of Noya. Until -

"Look at me," Noya says, sharp on the consonants, and Asahi's head snaps up on instinct, on muscle memory, on the hook Noya has in his blood being tugged and _hard_. They stare at each other for a moment. Noya laughs, but the laugh has an undercurrent and Asahi thinks _he's nervous_. It makes two of them. It always makes two of them, with this. Noya shrugs, a quick roiling motion. The material shifts around his legs. Asahi doesn't look at the hem and looks back up at Noya's eyes quick.

"I heard this sort of thing was supposed to be sexy or something," Noya says, half-laughing again. "I mean, who the fuck knows, right? Google doesn't know shit, and -"

"It is," Asahi says, louder than he expected. He licks his lips and watches Noya's eyes flare. Swallows. When Noya shifts his weight to walk forward now, there's something almost predatory about it. "It is, Yuu."

"Well," Noya says, "if you insist." Under the shift of Noya into his lap and the hitch in his own breathing, Asahi could almost miss the way Noya's shoulders relax. He doesn't. Nishinoya Yuu always gives himself away.


	2. don't hold your breath (bokuto/kuroo, canon compliant/future)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for dilara, who asked for domestic bokukuro, and whom i gave Suffering instead

Here’s the story: it’s three in the morning, maybe four, and Tetsurou wakes up to the sound of the shower running and Bokuto singing in broken English. _You can’t touch me now, there’s no feeling left. If you think I’m coming back, don’t hold your breath._  Tetsurou stretches against the sheets, cracks his neck, half-awake so the vague lightbleed of colours in the room seems hazy and drunk. Bokuto’s t-shirt is curled and crumpled on the floor, the acid green of it washed to sea-foam in the faint light from under the bathroom door. _What you did to me, boy, I can’t forget._  Tetsurou doesn’t try to push himself awake, doesn’t give in to sleep, hovers on the delicious halfway line in between. It’s fine. He doesn’t have anywhere else to be. The shower makes a noise like rain on the window, Tetsurou thinks, then thinks _of course it does_. It’s just water falling.

It's not raining outside; it's the electric pretence of a Tokyo night, where the suburbs are gone quiet and the last train has gone and the club-lights dapple the pavement. Tetsurou had been dreaming, and there's the edges of it clinging. He's eighteen-twenty-thirty, in the way dream-logic allows and in the way science posits is possible, and when he walked his hip knocked into Bokuto's, easy and familiar, and his hand had been hot against Bokuto's sun-warmed neck. He hadn't known he was dreaming for a while. _One day_ , Bokuto had said when they were nineteen (lying there with Tetsurou catching his breath beside him, both equally ripped open in nakedness, lovebites as battle wounds, see, Tetsurou can imagine it even now, he doesn't even have to close his eyes); _one day, we're gonna get used to this, you and me. One day, it's gonna come natural, and we won't be waiting to get caught out._

_Caught out at what?_

Bokuto had shrugged. _I dunno. Trying to have it all. Wanting too much._ And he'd closed his eyes, and fallen asleep right there, mouth slack and ridiculous and the hook of his nose, the curl of his lip smudged by the pillow. Tetsurou had watched it all with a great unfurling yawning in his chest. To die would be an awfully big adventure. To fall in love with a boy who, at the very core of it, knew him; who had gotten under his skin and turned him inside out, was like running into the sea without knowing if you'd remembered to take the stones out of your pockets first. They'd walked in sync from seventeen, Bokuto and Kuroo, Kou and Tetsu, if one went down the other couldn't tread water - 

Tetsurou opens his eyes when the bathroom door opens. He doesn't remember closing them. Koutarou is using the towel on his hair first and a rivulet of water slicks down one hipbone and Tetsurou is gone, has always been gone; has been dead and buried for this boy since the day he saw Koutarou laugh at him from the wrong side of the net and felt himself burn under the weight of Kenma's knowing eyes all the walk home. 

Treading water's overrated. Koutarou smiles, wide and glistening, teeth and skin in the half-light; and Tetsurou didn't notice how it started but he's smiling too, in the close-lipped half-smirk he'd perfected as a thirteen year old hiding his braces. Old habits, you know the drill. 

"You coming to bed, babe?" Tetsurou says, the inflection mocking and soft all at once, and watches Koutarou laugh. They're good at this game. There's time. They haven't been caught out yet. 

 


	3. ferrous (kuroo/kenma, star wars!verse)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> smuggler!kuroo based on radiosilent's art

When Kuroo Tetsurou is twenty years old, he meets the love of his life. She’s got a spine of steel cable; it will never snap like his, soft membrane that he is. She’s unassuming and her skin is cold to the touch and she will not be broken in by a poor boy like him; and she’s exactly what he needs, young and angry and gunning for a cause, desperate not to die hemmed in by the taste of dust in his mouth. He looks at her, and it guts his chest like an imploding star.

 

“I’ll take her,” he says, cutting across the spiel, and holds his hand out to shake on it without ever looking away from her hulking, grounding weight.

 

When Kuroo Tetsurou is twenty years old, he falls with his eyes wide open. When Kuroo Tetsurou is twenty years old, he runs away to the stars. They’re gonna say that he’s a sly cheating bastard, a no good son of a bitch who’ll cut your throat as quick as he’ll deal you in; but Kuroo’s a monogamist at heart, a stupid fucking romantic, and he’s only ever gonna love like this once.

 

*

  
So here’s the thing, Kuroo Tetsurou’s already met the only girl he’ll ever call darling like it matters, but he should’ve known better than to call it so early in the game. They’re only in the first round, and when Kozume Kenma scowls at him, Kuroo smiles big; smiles wide, smiles to show all his teeth, and tucks his hands in his pockets quick to hide the dirt ground in under his nails. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; Kuroo is from the gutters of bounty hunting, he’s good at a bloodsport and doesn’t know how to reach for Kenma without making it look like kidnap. Kenma is cut glass, and Kuroo’s fingerprints leave smudges.

Then Kenma uncurls from a cell bed, all spite-opaque eyes and tightly coiled shoulders, and Kuroo realises: Kenma may never have gotten their hands dirty, but it's not from lack of trying. It's not from lack of wanting. The lack does not exist; it's just been a dearth of opportunity. 

Kenma pretends not to be looking, but choreographs intent in the flickering strobe-light of their eyes, watching Kuroo's hands on the controls. It's like falling for an implosion.

When Kuroo Tetsurou is twenty years old, he falls with his eyes wide open. When he's twenty four, he falls and locks his gaze on the stars. 

It's almost the same, but you'd have to be stupid to not clock the difference. 


	4. affection (akaashi/kenma, thumbelina)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for kastron, based on the thumbelina fairy story as prompt

When he's asked, Keiji says he's never been in love. It's easier. The concern, the pity, all of it: it's just easier.

*

One day, Kuroo walks out of the woods with a body in his arms, axe holstered on his back and eyes wine-dark with worry. One day, Keiji hears the commotion from the village square and races Bokuto back from the fields. One day, they say the woodcutter's found a faerie child in the forest, and Keiji sees that their hair is gold, tarnishing to black on contact with Kuroo's human skin.

This is how the world ends: with a didikai farmhand and a changeling. This is how the world ends: Keiji sees Kenma's hair turn black, but Kenma's eyes stay gold. This is how the world ends; except it doesn't. Not for everyone. Just for Keiji.

*

Kenma doesn't talk to the other villagers; they're small enough to slip up through the branches in the local orchard and hide there all day, licking peace juice from their hands, eyes bright and sharp between the leaves. They eat the fruit pits whole and sleep curled up in rose petals. When they smile, their teeth shine like needles; when Keiji makes it up to the third branch, he sees their eyes flash liquid with fear.

"Don't run away," he pleads. "Please don't run away," and Kenma slowly settles back on their branch. "I brought you cherries."

Keiji leaves his hand outstretched, the stain of the fruit on it like a temple offering. Kenma snatches them up, in one quick movement, fluid and unsettling, and then turns their back. Keiji can hear the crack as they eat the stones, the low hum of satisfaction. He smiles, stays on the third branch, and takes out his book.

*

By the second week, Keiji has made it up to the fourth branch. By the fourth week, he's sat so close to Kenma he could touch them. He never does.

*

Just because you do not do a thing, doesn't mean you don't want to.

*

"Just kiss them," Bokuto says, wiping the sweat from his face in the heat of the crop and laughing at Keiji's expression, "It's the solstice, Akaashi! Anything can happen on solstice."

Keiji swings his scythe again and watches it reap the wheat and doesn't think about fae or miracles or contracts all the rest of the day.

*

Here's a secret: Keiji has always been scared of dying in this town, the earth moving on without him and no magic to speak of.

Here's a secret: Keiji has always been scared.

*

"Are you ever going to kiss me," Kenma asks, sat next to him in the tree licking cherry juice from their wrist, and Keiji nearly falls off the branch. "You keep staring at my mouth."

Keiji wonders if he's supposed to apologise. The moonlight hits Kenma's face and gilds it strange, gilds it familiar: Keiji has never wanted more, and it curdles silver in his veins.

*

Kenma kisses first. Their hand is sticky against Keiji's face, and Keiji walks home, fruit-drunk, at dawn.


	5. plague (bokuto/akaashi, the ugly duckling)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> for keptein, based on the ugly duckling fairy story as prompt (and referencing the leda myth and a few other ones about the greek underworld, besides)

Koutarou doesn't know how to let things die.

*

For you to understand how Koutarou ends up combing the river of the Dead, you need to understand that for Koutarou, everything has been in a process of becoming for a very long time. Humans are very slow to carve themselves out of their own meat, baby fat and bone structure. Koutarou was lucky. Koutarou ran wild when he was young and tangled his hair and wove reeds for a crown. He kept running wild, only now the crown was real. That's what you get when your father's a god in the guise of a swan. They've given away kingships for less.

That's what Keiji tells him anyway, when Bokuto's sixteen and on the hunt, sprinting barefoot through the woods after a deer and laughing, laughing -

"It's easy to kill something weaker than you," he hears a voice say, the ripple of it cold like water.

It stings; he turns and scowls and opens his mouth. Sees an angry wood nymph with bone-sharpened blades, eyes dark as the trickle of rain through wet mulch. Koutarou, in an act rarely to be repeated outside of Keiji's presence, closes his mouth.

"Am I weaker than you?" he asks, months later, Keiji caging him in with their arms in the night. When Keiji kisses, it's like drowning. When Keiji kisses, Koutarou wonders how long he can hold his breath. Keiji considers him for a moment, tracing a finger over Koutarou's collarbone, the pale of it in the light. "You're spoilt," Keiji says instead, and smiles at him, and Koutarou forgets how that cannot be an answer.

*

It's easy to kill something weaker than you; Koutarou learnt to hold his breath. That made one of them.

*

Death is easy; that's what Keiji taught Koutarou at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen; their laugh thorn-sharp and the fluidity of their voice. Trying to pick out one shadow on the banks of the Styx isn't, but Koutarou's lucky. Koutarou has coins in his pockets instead of on his eyes, and Koutarou walked into the underworld alive to beg for a wood nymph's life. They've given away kingships for less; Koutarou has bet a crown on being able to know Keiji by soul, and it's not a crown woven of reeds. _You're spoilt_ , Keiji said once, but that doesn't make Koutarou weak.

"You never replied," Koutarou says now, throws his voice so it echoes back to him from the opposite bank. The weaving phantoms still. He keeps going. "When I asked if I was weaker than you. You never replied."

Koutarou takes off the crown and puts it beside him. The phantoms swarm at the gold; buy a way across the Styx, buy a way home, which is which and who even cares, anymore?

"I always knew I was the weaker. It comes with mortality, but I know how to stand still, Keiji, and I can. I can learn to hold my breath for you."

There's a noise, hurt and choked, a wound of a noise, and a blur of silver in the grey.

"You're a brat," Keiji says, spectre eyes shining. "You're a spoilt fucking brat and you don't know when to let things die."

"I love you," Koutarou says, and lets Keiji lead them out into the sun.

He leaves the crown behind.


End file.
